To Live Again
by Astarael00
Summary: You must make peace with the past. And the present, and the future.
1. Chapter 1

Dedication: To the Aicoholics; may we be a happily addicted family forever.

File 1

"We have a problem, Ai," he said when she picked up the phone.

"I see," she answered in lieu of dropping it.

Conan's voice hadn't been that high in years. Not since he'd rediscovered puberty, reconquered it, and set off to undo all of the misdirection he had woven around Ran, a cocoon of lies meant to keep her safe.

Ai had never discovered a magical, miracle drug that undid her mistakes, but at least there had been some comfort in watching him rebuild the life she'd fractured.

And there had been some revenge in growing up outside the long shadow of the ever-reaching Organization. It was broken now into tiny pieces that proper law enforcement was – theoretically – cleaning up. Uncharacteristically, neither she nor Conan had been curious about the remains at all. After the triumphant, desperate victory, everyone involved had simply drifted apart, as if with the core of the monster gone, there was no reason to scrutinize the disappearing remains.

But it would seem some things had no intention of disappearing. APTX, her old shadow from the land of shadows, back to haunt her again.

"How long do I have?"

"Assuming all of the dates are correct, approximately a week."

"I'll need another name, I suppose," she murmured absently, and was startled to hear his startled laugh.

"You could be your own cousin, or younger sister," Conan jabbed lightheartedly, "and use the other kanji of your name."

"You could be 'Doyle'," Ai slung back.

They shared a quiet chuckle before lapsing into a long silence. She scoured her memory for any hint of this side-effect she should have caught long ago, any hope that might remain of undoing it. He contemplated his short but tumultuous life, its current peace, its impending ruin.

"I'll need to run some tests," she sighed at last, unable to stop a small part of herself from happily anticipating the challenge. The rest was sensibly terrified of returning to the years of failure.

"You still live at Agasa's right?" At her confirming murmur, he promised, "I'll be there soon."

She lifted a brow at her clock, not that it responded to her expression the way Conan would have. He had hung up already, anyway. "I don't suppose you can go on the date with Ran I'm sure you set up for this fine Saturday night, anyway," she told it. "Not when none of your clothes fit you, again."

Her clock stared silently at her in blue.

* * *

"Come in," said the young woman to the oddly-dressed boy. The world held its breath for a punchline.

Conan simply nodded, adjusted his glasses, and concentrated on not tripping.

Ai closed the door, turned to offer coffee, tea, soda, anything. The look on his face told her that caffeine was not the drug he needed now.

"Lab," she motioned instead, and he shuffled after her with no further prompting.

She took a number of samples from both of them, set up a few experiments, pulled up data she had fervently hoped never to need again.

Conan, determined as always to do something useful while waiting, carried out and dusted off boxes of old clothes Agasa had kept from years ago. After changing into something more fitting, he thoughtfully brought out hers as well as his. If his hunch was right, she would need them soon.

"No wonder I never saw it," she said at length, pulling his attention from his work. He stuck his head back into the lab, noting immediately the slump of her shoulders, so familiar from another terrible day of terrible news. "I gave up so thoroughly back then that I never thought to continue monitoring us. The compound builds up over the years and reactivates."

"So..."

"So." Ai laughed bitterly. "There's still nothing I can do about it. An incurable elixir hidden inside an incurable poison. The secret to immortality, and all you have to do is not die once. Good thing they went down before anyone realized."

They both froze in place as the words of this blunt assessment sank in. She, starting to curl into herself in her chair, he, half in and half out of the lab.

"Come up," said Conan at last. "Let's talk."

They settled themselves in the living room, facing each other over cups of caffeine (the best she could do).

"I can't hate you, you know." He sounded as if he had tried. "I thought I should put that out there."

"What do you feel, then, if not hate?"  
_What could you possibly feel for me, if not hate?_

He was silent for a long moment, face pensive. His next words came slowly, individually, each one a stand-in for others he could not quite say.

"We could be partners."  
_You are not Ran and never will be, but I admire your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses as you do mine, and perhaps some good might come of this mess yet._

"Perhaps we might accomplish something, since we seem to have all the time in the world," he finished, not without sarcasm.

She inclined her head to the side slightly, acknowledging his theft of her usual acid. Her response was, then, bereft of it.

"Perhaps."

He nodded, taking her answer for the agreement it was. They shook hands – how cute, adults would think, two children making promises of forever.

Agasa-hakase, snoring convincingly down the hall, did not think it cute. In fact, he was terrified, as only a father faced with losing two of his children at once could be. He could handle – barely – the possibility of losing them to the world. As long as they were equipped with their considerable smarts, and his incredibly useful (and fun!) gadgets, there was at least a good chance that they would make it home every night.

He could even handle losing them to themselves. Shinichi had been in situations and under stress that would have made grown men cry, and yet somehow managed to keep himself together. Shiho had slowly pieced herself back together from the edge. Agasa liked to think that a warm, welcoming home filled with light, purpose, and an endless supply of terrible jokes had helped them both.

But this. How do you contemplate losing your children to eternity?

You do not, Agasa thought grimly. You simply do your best to leave something eternal behind for them.

He smiled a lot, those last years. If Conan and Ai suspected that any of his cheer was bravado, they said nothing. They were smiling too, in all of the many pictures.


	2. Chapter 2

File 2

"I'm home!" sang Ran to the darkened house. Halfway through taking off her shoes, reaching for the light switch, she jerked as if burned.

There was a heartbreakingly familiar figure sitting on their couch. By the time she had coaxed her trembling fingers into turning on the lights after all, her vision was so blurred by tears that the figure was still an indistinct figure.

She could vaguely make out a blue suit with a red bowtie.

"Welcome home. How was work?" The familiar words in the familiar voice coming from the tiny figure were all _wrong_.

She collapsed in place without answering.

"I'm sorry," said a child's voice.

She had had this nightmare before, though they'd finally stopped a couple years ago. Maybe work was stressing her out more than she thought. She pinched herself.

"This isn't a nightmare, Ran," the child said gently. And again, "I'm sorry."

"How?" she sobbed. "I thought we were past all of this! You said the Organization had been toppled, that we could live our lives again." There was a considering pause as she gathered herself. "You wouldn't be here if they were back."

He walked over to offer her a handkerchief he didn't need, for all that he was suspiciously bright-eyed.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. "But even though they haven't returned, I can't stay. I only came to say goodby-" Conan's voice cracked, and not from the third bout of puberty he hadn't hit yet.

He took a few shaky breaths, then tried again, raggedly honest, "There's still a chance we can fix this, somehow, but it may take years. Many, many years. You've waited so long already. I can't ask you to wait any more."

"How many years?" asked Ran determinedly.

"I'll visit as much as I can," he said. She read the answer in his eyes.

"You're going back to Agasa-hakase's, aren't you?" It wasn't much of a question. Neither was the next: "And Ai-chan is involved too, isn't she?"

He simply nodded, grateful not to have to keep secrets from her.

"Tell Ai-chan I said hi," Ran murmured absently, eyes unfocused as she concentrated very hard on not feeling anything. Then, before she could help herself, she added, "and to return you to me as soon as she can."

Conan didn't comment. Silently he reached up, too-small hand cupping the sharp angles of her adult face, a familiar gesture lost to time.

* * *

"I'm back."

Ai looked up from her fashion magazine, jerked from thoughts of learning to tailor larger clothing to fit a smaller (and smaller) figure.

"Welcome back. How did it go?"

"Urrnngh," he said expressively, as he flopped onto the couch and buried his face in a pillow.

She huffed out a laugh at his childishness – unbegrudged – but reminded him seriously enough, "Don't get too comfortable. We still have to figure out what we're going to tell everyone else."

"Urrnngh," said the pillow expressively.

She poked him with her rolled-up magazine. Once. Twice.

He twitched, eventually sitting up and rubbing his eyes tiredly. "What are our options?"

When she didn't answer immediately, he stopped rubbing one eye in order to stare at her. She stared back.

"What," Ai asked in almost mocking disbelief, "you aren't simply going to run off with some hare-brained scheme you're so sure will work that you won't explain it to me?"

To his credit, Conan flinched.

"This is rather more complicated, has a much different timeline, and involves both of us. I'm a brilliant detective, not a brilliant life-planner."

She snorted. "Evidently."

He glared.

She stared.

They sighed.

"We can go into hiding," she started, "telling some or none of our friends and contacts. We can live our lives as they are, though by staying on the radar we'd eventually end up in a lab somewhere as test subjects. Either way we'd probably still need to hide from any remnants of the Black Org – I'm still not convinced they're entirely dead."

Conan nodded his agreement. "The Boss' suicide was a little too convenient, and there were no records to match some of the deceased. We were convinced enough not to look further at the time, though. Have you thought of something since that makes you more suspicious about it?"

Ai's brow twitched before she could stop it, remembering Gin. "I was too happy to see him dead to notice at the time, but..." she trailed off, then looked straight at him. "To be frank, when I went in to ID the body, Gin looked like he had been shot by himself."

"Suicide? Gin?"

"No. The pattern of bullets – Gin loves to toy with some of his victims. Maybe he was keeping someone around as a duplicate, and thought the body should have scars to be believable as a top Black Org agent. It's not like him to be sloppy enough to leave even a somewhat recognizable trace, but perhaps he believes that the people who would notice his kind of pattern are dead. Or perhaps he was simply punishing the duplicate who nearly got away..."

She shuddered, remembering a cold night many years ago, on which she had become intimately acquainted with Gin's idea of flair. And, many years before that, with his idea of fun.

"Or..." she continued at half the volume of a whisper, "perhaps he was leaving a message."

Conan reached out to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but paused as her eyes lifted and caught his. In the instant before she shuttered them again, he saw raw fear, hatred, and pain. Even stronger in this moment than many times years ago while actually fighting the Organization. Had those old feelings festered and grown over time? Or...was this about Gin specifically?

In a moment of painful clarity – the tall man's smirk, his constant hunting of Sherry, the snidely cutting invasive remarks, her reactions – it all came together.

She saw in his face the exact moment he figured it out, his hand dropping between them with the cold weight of realization.

Shiho turned away from him, turned her back to him, headed for the kitchen to make herself a cup of anything that didn't taste like despair.

"We'll find him," said Shinichi, in what was by far the coldest tone he had ever used in any life. The bright voice so used to declaring truth was now steely as it declared war. "Would you like to have a gun when we do?"

"Yes."

He should have been scared of her flat, honest answer. He should have been disgusted by what he was proposing. He should have been able to stop himself from turning into a vengeance-seeking demon the likes of which he had sent to jail for years.

Instead all he could feel was a sudden, shocking rush of gratitude. _Thank you, _he wanted to say, _for being so strong all these years. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for letting me help you._

When she turned back around with her mug, Conan was rubbing his eyes again.


	3. Chapter 3

File 3

Everything was ready. They had their new lives laid out before them, and the destruction of their old ones was under way.

The day before their supposed flight to America, where Conan and Ai would be staying for a few years (forever), Ran invited them to a dinner they could not possibly refuse.

It was the last chance the Detective Boys would have to hang out, and Sonoko, Ran, and even Eisuke had said they could make it.

They met up at a nice family restaurant, exchanged happy greetings, and all generally marveled at Eisuke's newfound sense of balance.

"Wow!" both Sonoko and Ran exclaimed, watching him, "You're like a changed man!"

Eisuke smiled brightly, scratching the back of his head nervously with a hand. "Some friends in America have been helping me out. I owe them a lot."

They therefore made it to their table safely and without incident, though the incident started when their waiter turned out to be a tall, dark, handsome young man.

It took several minutes to get Sonoko's order out of her, since everything else about her seemed to be spilling from her mouth instead. Disappointingly for her, he seemed only and overly interested in Haibara Ai.

"Well, perhaps in a few years." Tilting a wink at Ai, the handsome waiter slipped a small takeout menu under her plate.

Though she was sure, as the rest of the chortling table was, that the young man's number was scrawled on the menu somewhere, she picked it up and began to look it over anyway. It was something to do.

When she saw the small lines of neatly printed writing, she forced herself not to react, waiting until everyone else had turned their attention to a new conversation.

_selenium, chromium –_It was a list of chemicals. Ai immediately mentally shortened all of them to their letters, stared blankly for a few seconds, and decided it was a message in mangled English and Japanese.

_Secret for a woman_, read the liberal interpretation_, Not same man._

Almost immediately she turned to show Conan and whisper the message in his ear. And almost immediately afterward, a spine-chillingly familiar melody wove through the air.

"Oo, is that a new ringtone?" enthused Sonoko. "It's pretty!"

Eisuke smiled disarmingly. "Y-yes, I heard it somewhere and thought so too."

Though they had had plenty of doubts before, there were none now, if only because the spine chills had taken over their minds, and _flight _mode was in full control.

Just after Eisuke excused himself to take the call, Ai secretly called Conan's phone, and both of them slipped out on pretense of being needed by Agasa.

In fact, _they_ were in need of Agasa. Immediately. Surely he could help them hide for at least until Eisuke went back to America.

Like them.

Oh no.

* * *

It took them days to track down Eisuke's location, and the person they found there was not Eisuke.

"Gin!" breathed Ai. Conan marveled that there was tense anticipation under the by-now expected fear, hatred, and pain. She had her gun with her, concealed against the (very) small of her back, but it was anyone's guess as to whether she would use it.

"Sherry," he answered her calmly.

There was something decidedly off about this whole thing. Maybe this Gin was someone in disguise, supposed to get everything they knew out of them before the real one turned up to kill them? Except Ai didn't shake like that unless Gin himself was involved.

Perhaps running them around for days and then killing them before they got to the bottom of everything was enough sport for the real Gin, after all.

"What do you want with us?" asked Conan bluntly. There had to be a reason for this standoff. He may not have been trained by the Black Org like the other two in the tiny vacant apartment, but there was no way this was standard procedure.

"I'm using you to get Vermouth," Gin informed them just as bluntly. "Now shut up."

They stared. He waited. They stared some more. He waited.

Vermouth did not put in an appearance.

Eventually Gin's cellphone rang, and as he went to pick it up, Ai shot him in the chest.

He took a breath, informed her, "That was rude," and answered the phone, "Do you have her?"

He paid considerably more attention when Ai deliberately shot out his kneecap instead. Grunting in what was either surprise or pride, he pulled out his own gun as he went down.

Perfect in spite of being one-handed, falling, and with a fireball for a knee, he shot clean through Ai's right shoulder.

The look on Gin's face was definitely pride, decided the frozen Conan, as instead of crying out and dropping her weapon, Ai calmly shot Gin in the head with the gun in her left hand.

The recoil made her tiny frame move backward, and the momentary loss of balance proved her undoing. The gun dropped as her left hand went up to clutch her shoulder, thankfully not firing as it landed, and her unsteady knees followed it to the floor.

Ai stared blankly at the hole in the head of her former mentor.

It took Conan longer than he was proud of to snap out of his stupor, but once he did, they were up and running, Ai's gun scooped up on the way. He dragged her along by her left bicep, alternately encouraging ("Let's go, we have to get you cleaned up") and scaring ("Someone was on the other end of that phone, and they probably know where and who we are") the glassy-eyed girl into keeping up.


	4. Chapter 4

File 4

She slid out of the passenger seat, five envelopes held securely in a gloved hand. Less than a minute later she was back, letters sent, and no one the wiser.

"Done. Let's go."

Shinichi, whose name would never again be Shinichi, nor Conan, nodded. Shiho, whose name would similarly never be Shiho, or Ai, nevertheless called him "Shin" and was called "Ai." They'd settled on the meaningless pretend endearments years ago, as a way to keep themselves grounded and avoid using the wrong cover name. They spent little enough time in public and moved around enough that this system worked.

If the irony of their meaningless nicknames ever bothered them, they never said so.

They appeared to be twenty-something, plenty old enough not to be suspicious if seen driving. A perk of this part of the cycle. Their bodies were actually approximately 16 at the moment. Their minds were actually approximately 36.

They drove back home in easy silence, put away case files and APTX data from the morning, made lunch, and headed back to office and lab, respectively. Shinichi spent the next few hours uncovering the mystery of why their shipments to Africa were getting delayed, and Shiho experimented with a new spray aimed at neutralizing certain biochemical weapons.

Soon enough they reconvened for dinner.

"Fixed?"

"Yep. Any progress?"

"Coming along. I give it another month or two before we can add it to the product line."

"Hm. Should I start negotiations?"

"Only with America and Japan. The next-best group will want to see results first, and the rest are more worried about nukes and slugs."

"Indeed."

After dinner came the real work. Pulling information from contacts around the world – many of them from the weapons and supplies business they had constructed for the purpose – they tracked orders and shipments and other information, overlaying a map of power and events in various colors on a large map of the world.

Shady dealings abounded, people fought and died and abused each other, and still the tail of the slowly rebuilding Black Organization whisked out of sight around every corner.

Still, they had the time to be patient, and there was much good to be done in the meanwhile.

Satisfied with their work for the day – he'd solved two tough cases, she'd finished a batch of promising temporary antidotes, the shipment should arrive on time for the coup, the spray was more or less stable now – they went to sleep contented.

A few such days later, when they woke to find five envelopes stuffed in their post office box, they were far from contented.

Each envelope perfectly matched the ones they had attempted to send to their friends – Agasa, Kogoro and Ran, Ayumi, Mitsuhiko, Genta.

Each envelope contained a picture of the friend they had tried to send it to.

Each picture made them feel anew like throwing up.

When finally they regained some semblance of control, Shinichi pointed a shaking finger at a little knot of hair that was present near the body in each picture.

The hair was silver. Gin was long dead.

"It's them," he said.

The first thing they did was abandon their current personas, in particular any connection to that post office box, and spend most of that day making the switch to one of many other sets they had ready.

Then they got to work picking out clues from the pictures.

Their bodies were approximately 16. Their minds were approximately 36. If they still had souls, well. Those would probably need carbon dating.


	5. Chapter 5

File 5

She stared into the mirror and could not recognize her reflection. (_Who are you?_)

She glanced down at her tightly clenched fist, at the tiny, complex pill in an equally tiny, complex hand. (_What am I?_)

She thought of the past, could remember only a shadowy figure whose edges blurred the more she tried to focus on them. "I'm sorry," she wanted to tell whoever that was, but the words died in the darkness just as she should have long ago. (_When was that?_)

She blinked and returned to the present, looked around her with the flat stare of one accustomed to being in strange places for no apparent reason. Her body ached vaguely of capture and chloroform, but she was not restrained in any way. (_Where is this?_)

She opened the door of the bathroom and returned to the room she'd woken in. It was a bedroom, bare of everything save the necessities. A single, narrow bed, a single, narrow wardrobe, a single, narrow mirror, a single, narrow window, a single, narrow door, locked from the inside. There was no note, no message of any sort, no sound save the passing of an occasional car on a street invisible from her window. (_Why am I here?_)

Stuck in a stuffy room, feeling the lack of anything better to do, she opened the window. Her tiny, skinny arms pushed with surprising strength against a sliding window better-maintained than it appeared. The pane slammed against the top of the frame with a crack like a gunshot.

"Ai!" came a sudden shout, the young voice desperate and hoarse. Someone with light footsteps ran to her door, fumbled impatiently with something that undid the lock, and threw open the door. Suddenly it seemed even narrower, filled by a boy no bigger than she was, and just as rattily dressed. The strange gadget in his hand looked like it could pay his rent for years.

She was abruptly, completely seized by relief at the sight of this odd stranger. Seeing it, the boy smiled brilliantly with equal relief and moved toward her, only to come up short at the obvious incomprehension on her face.

"Don't you remember...?"

She shook her head wordlessly. Her answer was a sigh. A carefully drawn breath. And then: "I knew they would do something."

The abject sorrow in the words made her hands twitch unconsciously. The act brought a dull ache – the forgotten pill pressed into her still-clenched fist. She loosened her grip slightly.

He noticed.

"What...?" He didn't finish the sentence. She didn't wait for him to finish. The pill was shown to him; his eyes widened.

"You..." He was staring at her in something resembling shock now, but she didn't respond. Eventually he finished his sentence, in a breathless, not-quite-hopeful way: "...protected that?"

She obviously didn't understand. He didn't care.

"Please take it." He never begged, rarely said 'please'. He still didn't care.

She stared at him, silent, for a long moment. Then she slowly nodded and walked to the bathroom. The door closed; through it came the brief sound of running water.

The house was deathly silent for a minute. His muscles tensed, wound tight in desperate hope, horrible fear.

She screamed.

The boy-spring flew into action, released by the sound. The bathroom door was flung aside. It slammed into the wall; the doorknob made a distinct indent. He didn't notice.

She had collapsed on the unforgiving tile, miniscule frame shivering unconsciously from the cold already. He knew it wasn't just the cold.

Gently he picked her up, deposited her on the bed in the other room. There was nothing he could do for her right now, as experience had taught both of them, so he meticulously inspected the place. It was a nondescript thing: an average house in an average neighborhood. There was nothing average about the basement.

It was dark red, the color of rust and dried blood, in many spots; there were patches on the walls and floor which indicated the former presence of less-than-pleasant devices. There was no motion and no noise - yet the empty, silent room screamed constriction, blackness, blood, torture, death.

He, used to such things by now, nevertheless stepped hurriedly out and shut the door. It was worse than he thought. Then he paused, reopened the door after bracing himself. On the few desks were piles of papers that might-He took a step or two forward and stared in horror. Numbers flashed brightly in a dark corner, glowing a shade of red this place must have seen many times before.

Of course.

He sprinted toward the bedroom, door (_trigger_) slamming shut behind him as a futile shield and useless rejection.

She hadn't moved, and some part of him was both grateful and amused. This had happened before, that part thought detachedly with wry humor, as he glanced at the window calculatingly. A close fit, yes, but it would do.

He pulled her off the bed, considered the window again. The latch was stuck, he knew from his rounds (of course it was; whoever-it-was up there laughing down at him certainly hadn't stopped now), and there was no convenient projectile this time. No matter: it was not reinforced at all, since the house was an old one.

A second later, they were through the window and landing in an overgrown bush currently taking over the jungle intended as a backyard. He pulled both of them out hurriedly, as far away from the house as he could manage: not very far. They were much the same size, after all, and he had never been a particularly strong child.

A still moment followed which was just long enough for him to wonder if perhaps he was being paranoid after all - maybe it was just an abandoned clock? A rare clock indeed, that ran backwards.

The house exploded.

Glass shattered everywhere – except on her, because he had shielded her without thinking. A powerful one, he mused when his brain started working again. The thought was silent, not voiced, since he wouldn't be able to hear for the next minute or so, and the only other person who'd listen was currently unconscious anyway.

_So,_ he thought, staring at the rubble of what used to be an abandoned house, _it really was a trap. All of that work for so little, and we almost died –_ _twice_. _But that's one less base to check, one less inhumane lab for their drugs and torture. And I found her. I _found her.

A soft rustle alerted him to the fact that he now had company. He turned quickly, with reflexes born of several years' constant tension, to find that she was waking up.

Characteristically, there was no fogginess in her eyes; sleep did not dull her senses, even a forced sleep. She glanced around professionally, noted the fallen house, her minor scrapes. Him.

They stared at each other.

He was the first to move, and even then only barely. He smiled. After a second spent relearning how to control her muscles, she smiled back.

"So you recognize me." It was not a question. He would not have smiled if it was a question.

"Yes."

"It worked."

"Yes."

"..."

"I don't know."

He looked up, unsurprised that she had read his mind. They had become closer, since Ran died. They had become more serious, since Kogoro was killed. They had become focused, now that Agasa was no longer around to help. They had become driven, once three innocents had been executed in their stead.

They had become professional, because everyone who ever mattered to either of them had been murdered.

"What-"

"It won't happen again."

The promise sounded casual. It was anything but.

"Running away?" Conan's would-be teasing had an edge born of fear, anger, and desperation.

"…Toward."

His eyes widened to clear blue saucers in his dirty face.

She couldn't laugh. "Yes. I found something. Notes. That lab," Ai gestured at the ruin, "was the headquarters for creating a drug to raise the dead. Messy business," she added in a murmur.

"Wasn't that your job? Did they succeed?"

"I'll tell you later."

Years ago this answer would have frustrated him to no end. Now, he nodded, understanding. In a swift, decisive movement, he brushed his hands off on the last clean part of his pants he could find, and offered one of them to her.

She took it, stood up, stood next to him. For a moment they stayed like that.

"Thank you," she said eventually, letting go. He nodded.

They went home.


	6. Chapter 6

File 6

Back in the shack centrally located in nowhere that their current young-orphan personas squatted in, Ai picked up where they'd left off.

"We have to help Vermouth."

Not quite where they left off.

"What?"

She took a breath and started over.

"They kidnapped me. I met her in the building they took me to, the one you found me in. She was dismantling the operation there. Literally."

"Why?"

"She was sick of it, she said. Something about how "that person" – the Boss, I assume – was trying too hard to be God and the Devil, and she was tired of it. All she wanted was to have fun and enjoy a "long, long life." Then she pointed me at a particular stack of papers and left."

"The notes you mentioned?"

"Yeah. I skimmed most of it before someone got past Vermouth and found me. Before you ask, the notes were mostly speculation on the Org itself, not drug tests. I'm not sure what they got me with, other than chloroform, or how I came to be holding what was probably the antidote."

She frowned, trying to remember, but all she could grasp was staring in shock at the papers, and the feeling of a cloth covering her mouth.

"Anyway, all the notes said of that lab was that their job was to raise the dead. And, to answer your earlier question, what they told me back then was that 'the goal of APTX is to undo a person's existence, and recreate it'. After a while I simply assumed that they wanted a traceless poison, and they would handle the recreation themselves."

A grimace told him she had plenty of evidence to back up this assumption.

"But maybe what they wanted all along was what I thought to be an inconvenient side-effect. Their reactions when they discovered our shrinking...And the notes: 'APTX is to be a punishment, designed to remove immortality without killing the victim, should the Boss decide to take away his gift,'" she paraphrased. And then, under her breath, in her own grim words, "A Silver Bullet to erase the monsters they themselves create."

Conan, who had been quiet to give them both the time and space to gather their thoughts, choked.

"'His gift'?" he asked with rising dread. "If they've had a way to control it for some time, that would explain Vermouth's unchanging age. And...possibly the Boss. Then, the real Eisuke was probably sacrificed to give the Boss a public face, and fake Eisuke will come to an untimely death whenever he feels like it. But why show us?"

"An acknowledgment, maybe, one immortal to its bastard child. Or maybe he hadn't intended to, and Vermouth was the one who showed us."

"She has to be up to something. 'I'm tired of it' doesn't seem like a very good reason to backstab your partner of..." he trailed off, realizing they had no way of knowing how long the two had been working together. "...of years."

They eyed each other silently.

"Maybe she just doesn't agree with what he's trying to do," Ai said finally. "Or maybe they're both just playing us. Eternity must get boring. Now they have two eternal toys."

Conan twitched his displeasure of this assessment, but didn't argue. He'd considered the same thing. And discarded it in favor of, "Either way it doesn't matter. Whether we use or help Vermouth to take down the Boss, he still needs to be brought down."

"Yes, well. Our business is booming, but even with all of our contacts we still have yet to grasp a significant lead. Each step of progress we make is due to a slip-up of the Org itself. Actually...it's usually due to Vermouth."

"So we need to contact her somehow. But no, she'll just assume it's a trap. The rest of the Org will probably make it one – like with Gin."

The name brought a harsh smile to Ai's lips. "At least we know now that she got away from that just fine."

"Unless she's a clone," he threw out idly.

They blinked and stared at each other.

"Dammit."

"Well, whatever she is, and whatever her reason is for doing it, she's helping. Now, how do we move the process along?"


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Before anyone asks, there is no file 8, and no sequel. I only spent a couple days on this fic, so I might edit it a little to smooth out rushed sections, but otherwise it's done. You want more, you write it yourself.

File 7

"No."

"You haven't even heard the rest yet."

"We've already practically rebuilt the Black Org in the name of finding contacts to stop it. I refuse to be a part of something like that again."

"We can change it. We didn't build a squad of loyal assassins, we built a network of information and shipping routes. We can ship other things. Aid. Peace troops. There is _so much good_ we can do. Don't turn your back on it."

She spun to face him, and he winced at her expression.

"Maybe the Boss thought that way too, at first."

"Then we just need to not lose ourselves the way he did."

"We can't guarantee that! How long can you go without thinking of Ran? A week? A day? A minute? How long can you go without wishing she was alive? How long can you go without trying to bring her back?"

He understood the look on her face at last.

Not anger. Loss.

"You think I'll break, then?" His voice was harsh, and she winced in turn and found the hotel carpet fascinating; but at the moment he couldn't bring himself to care. "Or maybe you think _you_ will. For who? Agasa?"

"You."

He breathed what might have been a laugh, in other circumstances. "And I, you. Then we just need to be very, very careful, right?"

An eyebrow told him her opinion of that plan.

"We can do this," he continued anyway. "We'll be okay. We have enough time. We can figure out how to-"

"Raise each other," she inserted flatly.

This time he outright _flinched_.

A tense silence.

"...No," he whispered at last. And then, stronger: "No. We'll have failsafes to guarantee that that's the end. We won't try to bring anyone back. We'll keep going until we fall, or we find a way to lay our friends to rest, finally. Properly. Not in the dirt, but inside. Or can _you _stay like this forever?"

Faint light made the shadows deeper. She closed her eyes. "I...hadn't intended to."

"You would've left?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Coward."

"Yes."

For a while they drowned separately in silence.

"Help me," someone whispered. "to live again."


End file.
